Architecture encompasses an appreciation of the most ordinary items of daily life. It lays down a “moral geometry” that keeps us mindful of our place in the greater scheme of the universe. Now more than ever, such an understanding is needed. Austria in particular has always sustained a profound belief in the analogy between the inner lives and outer manifestation of nature in the mineral world. It is a prominent theme in Adalbert Stifter’s works like Bergkristall, Kalkstein and Bunte Stein (Rock Crystal, Limestone and Colourful Stones, respectively). Goethe too believed in the ultimate Polarität of nature and existence. Appropriately, only a few steps away from the new Music Theatre on a small street named after Hugo Wolf, there is a sculpture by Fritz Hartlauer: Kristall. Made of curving sandstone and extending wider than a pair of outstretched arms, it is an endless proliferation of the cubic geometry of the crystal. Fritz Hartlauer committed suicide in 1983 just opposite where the new building is sited today. Perhaps the super ego of Ben van Berkel is embodied in this sculpture! As in science, it is the force behind the phenomena that concerns us here, a sign of nature’s inherent and monistic lawfulness. Although an invisible force, just like electricity and magnetism, science tells us that the whole earth and heavens comprise nothing but the same self-lawfulness of material existence. The desire to draw from the difficult geometry of the Moebius strip and Klein bottle is the desire to glean the elements of a language that would allow us to perceive the limits of the world as we know it, and glimpse a world never experienced before. This has been the main drive of UNStudio ever since its very early projects. It is a strategy followed in both the series of small-scale private houses and the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart, where the inner core provides an endless spiral strip of ramps to accommodate exhibits and public in an interior promenade. Here in Graz, we are invited into a building masked in a second skin of delicately woven metal mesh that bends to cover the entire curving profile of the building. On entering this iron curtain the public is invited to a scala regia that spirals upwards to the theatre entrance on the second floor. This wave-like staircase makes visible those invisible forces. It is not unlike music, which attempts to make sonorous forces that are not themselves sonorous. For a sensation to exist, a force must be exerted on a body, at a point of the wave (Deleuze). How can these elementary forces - pressure, inertia, weight, attraction and gravitation - be made visible? How can they be rendered? In this Music Theatre we are made to feel the full measure of the task. Not only are we asked to imagine the painting of sounds, we acquire a sense of transcendence, an uplift as we ascend the stairs. It is above all through sensation, which materialises into thought, that we discover a residue of our own experience. Once we are sat in the Music Theatre, a hall simply clad in painted wood relief with a repeated motif like a cipher drawn from the design processes, the drama of the staircase is out of sight. Although no longer seen, however, the after-image creates its equivalent in our minds. It brings the circle of the spectator’s gaze to a halt. He/she will be ready to take in the theatrical performance of musical works seated on electrically powered benches, each of which can establish its own height, offering an endless permutation in the concert hall configuration. In a town which has given us Günther Domenig and his “Stone House”- a town which not long ago celebrated the only Peter Cook building ever built (the Kunsthalle shaped like a large blue plastic potato resting on the other side of the river), it is a sheer pleasure to stroll up from the large neoclassic, Opera House to this modest size Music Theatre. When Günther Domenig was asked what he owed his radical departure to, he apparently answered that as his father was a Nazi, he could hardly have done otherwise. It is against this background in which the forces that shaped life in this city have not yet exhausted their turbulent death dance, that this new musical adventure is taking place. If there is excess in the geometry, it is far from exaggeration; it enables form to take its place fully - to be itself - and not merely be useful. After the experience of the enigmatic construction with its veil like façade, the surprise elicited by the interior is the greater. The inner structure of the staircase touches our tactile and visual senses, setting them in motion, preparing us, the audience, to be moved by strong emotion. This is an eventful building in which there will always be a double performance: on the stage itself but also in the stage set of the building. While the rhythmic arrangements of UNStudio projects are never identical, they are very closely related. Theirs is the twist sparked by discontinuity of volume and recapitulation. Whatever the infinite nuances achieved, their theoretical position is always pushed to the extreme - never afraid to follow an ingenious insight to its nonsensical conclusion.And we certainly prefer critical paranoia to critical regionalism. Here in Graz, this is their new project. Perhaps the power of architecture lies in being able to dislodge us from habits of mind and feeling. And in Graz the urgency is greater than elsewhere. While the “voice of the majority is powerless to make me enjoy, or disenjoy, the lines of Catullus” (E. Pound), it is worth the try. Yehuda E. Safran